


laid out one by one

by essektheylyss (midnightindigo)



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Brotherhood, Confessions, Drinking & Talking, Gen, Late Night Conversations, the inherent bond of religious trauma siblings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-18
Updated: 2020-04-18
Packaged: 2021-03-02 05:34:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,288
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23710000
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/midnightindigo/pseuds/essektheylyss
Summary: Verin Thelyss gets a visit from a ghost.He should’ve known better to think that, when his older brother disappeared, it was anything but of his own volition. He should've known that whatever skeletons his brother buried, he was the only person in the Dynasty that might hear about them.
Relationships: Essek Thelyss & Verin Thelyss
Comments: 15
Kudos: 213





	laid out one by one

**Author's Note:**

> *slaps my fic document* this baby can fit SO much projection! 
> 
> Title from "Flaws" by Bastille.

There aren’t any footsteps, but Verin shouldn’t be surprised, not when he’s staring at a ghost.

Especially not when that ghost is his older brother.

Essek’s feet only touch the ground as he enters the kitchen of Verin’s humble abode. And it is humble—there is plenty of space in Bazzoxan, but a lack of material resources means that even officers’ quarters are small and sparse.

“Well,” Verin says slowly. His door was sufficiently locked when he’d gotten home for the evening, after a long day of patrols and then paperwork, but ghosts don’t well heed walls. Neither do archanists, he reminds himself. “Shall I get a second glass?”

Essek sits heavily in the spindly chair that is the only other seat in the room. He’d never slouched in all the years Verin had known him, but Verin isn’t sure he knows the man across from him anymore. 

“No need,” Essek mutters, and pulls the bottle of whiskey toward him. He takes a very long swig and wipes his mouth on his bare wrist, giving Verin the chance to fully process what his brother looks like.

His hair has grown long enough to be pulled back into a wavy ponytail, braided along the crown of his head where the undercut he’s used to ends. He has shed the heavy mantle and the long robes, opting for a far more practical pair of trousers and boots, and where the sleeves of his blouse is rolled up, his arms carry scars, the likes of which Verin never thought he’d see on Essek. They’d always diverged on that—where Verin was willing to get hurt, prove himself, Essek never got his hands dirty.

His hands have seen the muck now; he rubs the calloused palm of one hands with the leathery skinned fingers of the other, and he doesn’t quite meet Verin’s eyes.

It is a long, long time before Verin breaks the silence that rests upon them, heavier than any mantle either of them has ever worn.

“Shall I call for a celebration? Mother will be overjoyed to discover that you are alive.”

Essek’s crooked smile is answer enough, but he speaks anyway. “Oh, no. No, I find that being a ghost suits me far better than any title I held in the Dynasty.”

Perhaps Verin is imagining this conversation. He never thought he’d see the day that Essek admitted _that_.

Glass empty, he too drinks from the bottle.

“Why are you here, then?” he asks, and passes the bottle—Essek nods his thanks and takes it back. “Aside from to drink my good liquor.”

Essek _laughs_. That’s not a sound Verin thought he’d hear again, even before his brother had been declared dead. It makes his heart ache with nostalgia, for a time when the two of them had been inseparable, before they had picked at each other’s scabs too long to ignore the hurt they’d both caused.

“I needed someone to know,” he says, and takes a swig. “And you are the only person in this light-forsaken wasteland with a chance of understanding.”

Verin takes the bottle and sets it aside, then takes his brother’s hand. It is so solid and real in his that he wonders if the Essek he’d known had in fact been the ghost, and that something has born his brother anew in the ten years since he’s seen him.

His father has returned from the grave in the interim, in the same way his mother will die and return time and again within Verin’s lifetime. It would not be the first miracle he has witnessed.

There is not a member of Den Thelyss who does not know how rebirth feels, then, aside from Verin. It makes him feel very young. He wonders if he can actually offer whatever understanding Essek has come to find. 

“Father has returned,” Verin says softly, and lets go of Essek’s hand. “A bugbear, believe it or not. I think Mother was… surprised, but she hid it well.”

Essek snorts. “He and the Skysibil must have plenty to discuss then.”

“The Skysibil passed again. Three years ago, now.”

“Ah. Well, I would send my condolences, but… she won’t need them soon enough. And I’m dead as well, I hear.”

It doesn’t surprise him that Essek still has eyes and ears within the Dynasty, perhaps even his own. Divination and illusion were never exactly his specialties, but he’s always been adept at picking up whatever spells was useful to him.

“That odd, ah, troupe, that you put up in Rosohna, they’ve been in and out. I hear about them every now and again when they’ve caused a particular disturbance in the Gaulimaffrey. I’ve not met them, but… I think Mother finds them endearing.”

“Yes, she’s always had a funny idea of endearment.”

“And you? I thought you’d found them endearing as well. As much as you find anyone endearing.”

The crooked smile widens. “Where do you think I’ve been?”

Verin used to feel so stupid, when Essek talked like he should already know the answer; it had always taken him a moment longer to process questions like that. That, at least, has not changed. “With them?” He blinks. “Have you been in Rosohna? _With them_?”

“Oh, yes,” Essek smiles smugly. Verin has to resist the urge to roll his eyes. 

“You always were a cocky bastard.”

“You’re not wrong.”

Verin wants to ask why. He wants to ask what made that band of strangers so appealing, why Essek faked his own death to escape the Dynasty with them. Why Verin could never hold his attention, even when they were the only people who had a hope of understanding one another.

His breath huffs in his nose, a silent laugh. Perhaps that is still the case, if he’s arrived here, in Verin’s home, looking for some kind of recognition.

“Why are you here?”

“I’ve seen…” Essek looks at the ceiling, pulls at his hair to tighten whatever grasp the strip of leather has on it. “I’ve seen so much, Verin. I’ve been… so much farther than I thought I could go. And I’ve just been thinking for _years_ how foolish I was, to think that ascension was growth.”

Verin offers him another drink, and when this time he shakes his head, takes a drink of his own. “Where have you been, brother?”

The question is implicit, but he thinks Essek understands what he’s asking. He was always much quicker than Verin was, at answering that kind of thing.

“I couldn’t stay,” he sighs, and stares at his worn hands. “After the war ended, I just… I couldn’t take the risk. My soul couldn’t take the risk.”

“I don’t understand.”

“This is a confession, Verin,” Essek says, his voice little more than a murmur. The silence catches it, and it hangs heavy in Verin’s ears. “I admit, I’m surprised that no one has found me out. I suppose I did cover my tracks as well as I had hoped.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I stole the beacons,” Essek says, with only slight hesitation that he has to speak it out loud, that his little brother has still not caught up, and Verin stops cold as all of the blood drains from his face.

“Essek, _are you insane_?”

“Perhaps I was,” Essek says. “Not anymore.”

“Do you have a shred of self-preservation left? You can’t just say that to a member of the Aurora Watch. That’s the kind of thing I’m supposed to arrest you for, on the spot.”

“How about a brother? Can I admit that to a brother?” Essek snaps. Verin remembers the short-lived portion of their childhood, when they still told each other everything. It was only Essek’s growing distrust of him—of everyone—that had caused Verin to stop trusting him back. 

Both of them are so young, but the years have felt perhaps longer than they should, and he can see the lines in his brother’s face. It feels as though this small flat of his is in another plane, with the gravity of what his brother has just confessed. “Come now, Verin, you know I will be gone faster than you can catch me.”

“ _Why_?”

“Because, because—“ Verin has never seen Essek fumble over his words, and that alone makes him conflicted enough to hear him out. Essek’s right—this is the kind of thing that he alone might understand, so caught as they are between the worlds of politics, and consecution, and youth. He has done plenty of foolish things in his lifetime, things for which Essek frequently looked upon him with disdain, once he’d grown enough to realize that advertising his youth would earn him no favors, and he remembers the sting of that rejection viscerally enough not to return it in kind now. “Ever since I was a child I’ve been told how much I could achieve, how much I could discover, and then no one gave me the tools to do that. No one gave me the opportunity, the trust to achieve what they suggested I achieve. And I thought, foolishly, that the Cerberus Assembly might be… like-minded?”

“Didn’t the Mighty Nein assist with the Cobalt Soul’s ousting of several members of the Assembly several years ago?”

“Ah, so news does reach Bazzoxan,” Essek mutters with a tight-lipped smile. “I always wondered.”

“None of this makes sense, Essek.”

“They were… not the academic allies I had hoped they might be,” Essek says, and takes another drink. “They had also done harm to a dear friend, harm that they continued with others. They used the research that they promised me to do it.”

By all his training, he should be alerting the other guards right now, calling for backup, putting the man in front of him in chains. But he has been a brother far longer than he has been a soldier, even if it never came as naturally to either of them than the ones that their mother bestowed upon them.

He doesn’t move.

“You have never used the phrase ‘dear friend’ in all the time I’ve known you,” Verin says, and he can see the softness with the lines in Essek’s face, and he thinks of all the times he wished that Essek might meet him with that kind of gaze. How much he wished, before he knew any better, that they could’ve been friends, rather than just rivals. 

Brother is not a title that exists alone, not once parents and society get in the way, and he remembers that any friendship between them was never destined to last long in that environment, even as hard as he’d tried to force it.

He’s looking at a traitor, a man who sold his country for knowledge and influence, and all he can see is his brother. 

“No, I haven’t,” Essek whispers, and folds his wrists over each other on the table. “Perhaps under better circumstances, I would’ve.”

“Perhaps under better circumstances, you could return to the Dynasty.”

“Perhaps under better circumstances, you could leave it. But those are not the circumstances we were given. Not the hand we were dealt.”

It isn’t like Essek to talk of chance—he’s always molded chance to his own designs. Sometimes, Verin envied him for it, but too often he simply thought it another layer to his brother’s hunger. He had never been content with what had been given to him.

“What changed, then? You could’ve stayed, after the war. Why?”

“My friends… they… changed me. Saved me, I suppose one could say.” He laughs again, and it’s the sharp mirthless bark that Verin knows too well. “Isn’t that melodramatic? I… it was far harder to live with myself, after that. After I knew more.”

“Who are they? _What_ are they, that they could make _you_ reconsider something?”

“They are unpredictable,” Essek smiles, and his gaze is very far away. For a single, fanciful moment, Verin allows himself to wish that he was in the place wherever that gaze lands. “They are disarming.”

“Endearing.”

“Yes.”

He can’t help himself—the words are out of his mouth before he can think them through. “Why was I never enough then, brother?”

He hadn’t expected the stricken look that comes over Essek’s face.

“I have wondered that everyday for ten years,” Essek whispers. “Sometimes I think the first violence done to any of us is the entropy of family.”

“I spent decades trying to win your admiration before I simply gave up.”

“And maybe that was the problem. Admiration was something toward which I tried so hard to pretend I was indifferent, and you never hid your desire for it. And I envied you for how easy it was for you to seek it out, and I hated how much you seemed to crave it.” If Verin didn’t know his brother, he’d think there were tears in Essek’s eyes—but he doesn’t really know his brother after all, so maybe he’s seeing correctly. “I hated how much I craved a companion, how much I just wanted you to be my _friend_ , Verin.”

Verin wonders if he has ever known his brother as well as he knows this ghost in front of him right now. 

Finally, he stands and retrieves a second glass from the cupboard, the only other one he has. He is not accustomed to guests in this remote outpost, and he has never been one to leave dishes uncleaned. He pours them both a double, and passes one to his brother.

“When did you stop believing?”

This throws Essek a bit, and he blinks as he drinks. “Believing? I believed in nothing but myself until ten years ago.”

“Mother spent so much time after it became clear that we were both simply us trying to impress her virtues upon us. And I believed her for so long, but… it didn’t last long, here.” This is not a conversation he ever thought he would get to have with Essek, and he realizes what Essek meant when he had come looking for understanding—this isn’t a conversation he could have with anyone else this side of the Ashkeepers. “There is no way for belief to survive in a place like this.”

Essek nods. “No, I should think not.” He laughs. “Whatever the luxon is, with all of its power I cannot deign to believe that it cares for us. We benefit from its magic, but that’s coincidence more than any kind of destiny it has bestowed upon us.”

Verin doesn’t think this heretical talk is worse than treason, but he still feels the grip of fear over who might be listening in his chest more now than he did when Essek confessed. Their mother had taught them one thing well, and that was the virtues of silence. 

“When did you start believing in coincidence?”

“When my friends explained to me how they came about the beacon they returned to the queen,” Essek smiles. It’s almost unsettling how he can carry sharpness and softness together so well. If this is what it means to be haunted, Verin thinks, then the afterlife is indeed more terrifying than the depths of the earth he guards.

It almost makes him wish to be consecuted. Almost. 

“And how was that?” he asks, swallowing down his doubts. He has danced around his mother’s offers of consecution, of eternal life, unable to reconcile his own agnosticism with the unthinkable disappointment he knows he will see in her eyes. 

“They had been hired to stage a political coup in Zadash, the same night our spies attacked the Zauber Spire,” Essek laughs. Verin cannot think of any memory that would make him laugh like that, and he suddenly envies Essek as violently as he did as a child, for the footsteps of his brother that he knows he cannot follow. As Essek tells the story, with enough disbelief in the telling to make him shake his head as he trails off, Verin has never been so gripped with the desire to leave his home, to meet this band of strangers who have somehow turned Essek into this. 

“It sounds like fate.”

“Fate would be more believable. They are… chaos. Entropy.”

“And you with them now, I suppose.”

“Ah, I think I am now learning to keep up.” He looks up at Verin again. What kind of earnestness feels like the burn of the sun on his skin? “Would you like to meet them?”

When Verin hesitates, Essek leans forward, and there is an energy in his shoulders that Verin has never witnessed. 

“You would like them far more than I initially did, I think,” he says, and seems to be falling off into whatever memory brings this joy to his light eyes. “They want so dearly to be good, and… you were always so much better at that than I was, Verin, but I’ve learned—“

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Verin interrupts him, and the cloud that has hung above them through the conversation spreads over Essek’s face. “You are already taking a great risk in coming here, and I can’t know more than I already do.”

He’s still not sure how he’s going to show up to work tomorrow, knowing what he knows now. It is hard to continue to enjoy the presence of his brother with that weight upon his shoulders, that knowledge settling in. He was always slower than Essek, but his brain has caught up with all of the implications of what is happening now in his kitchen, and he cannot let it go much further than it already has.

“You’re right,” Essek sighs, and rubs a hand over his face. “I’m sorry for coming here. I’ve put you in a horrible position, I know.”

As he moves to stand, Verin catches his wrist. “Finish your drink, at least. Before you go.” 

Essek tries to hide the relieved smile that filters back in, but Verin sees him now, the little boy who always strived to be so much older than he was, who discarded his youth for opportunity. 

Verin is glad he has realized now that he is allowed to have both. He only wishes that realization had come sooner. 

“You don’t think you could join us?” Essek wonders, and Verin laughs.

“One of us has to make sure Mother doesn’t start to believe she’s failed at a parent, even if I have always been more proof of failure than you.”

“You were the best of us,” Essek says fiercely, and squeezes his fingers before Verin can pull away. He drowns back the last dregs of whiskey, and stands heavily on his worn boots. Verin can’t remember the last time he saw his brother stand before tonight. 

“Are you satisfied, then? Have you gotten whatever you’d hoped when you thought to come here?”

There’s the crooked smile Verin knows, again, as Essek politely pushes the chair in and sets the glass in the sink. “Have you ever known me to be satisfied, Verin?”

“After tonight, I’m not sure I’ve ever known you at all.”

“You knew me better than I knew myself, I think.”

He turns to walk down Verin’s thin hallway, toward the door, though Verin knows that Essek is just going to teleport away, off to whatever his next adventure is. How fanciful that thought is—his big brother, off on an adventure. 

“What is the statute of limitations on treason?” he calls, before Essek disappears into the shadows yet again. “Will we ever see each other again?”

Essek turns, and in the dark hall, he almost looks like an echo of himself as he grins. “I hope so, brother.”

And then, with a few sharp movements of his fingers, he’s gone.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! I hope you enjoyed! Let me know what you thought!


End file.
